Magazine|The Marriage That Led to the Russian Track Team’s Olympic Ban

Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Yuliya Stepanova and Vitaly Stepanov.Credit
Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times

The Marriage That Led to the Russian Track Team’s Olympic Ban

A doping track star and an anti-doping officer get married, nearly divorce, then blow the whistle on Russia’s state-run cheating.

By JOHN BRANTJUNE 22, 2016

On a bright morning this month, Yuliya Stepanova, one of Russia’s premier middle-distance runners over the last decade, churned through an interval session — six times 800 meters at a sub-three-minute pace, followed by six times 100 meters at a near sprint. She was paced by her husband, Vitaly Stepanov, a good runner who has completed a marathon in under three hours but by no means an elite athlete. Between the fifth and sixth repeats, as they jogged for 200 meters, Vitaly staggered but Yuliya moved in a tight, economical recovery stride, her face impassive, her blond ponytail dancing with each step.

The day’s demanding workout was a key part of Yuliya’s preparation to run the 800 meters at this summer’s Olympic Games. She had already posted the necessary qualifying time at a meet last year. But because of the role that she and her husband played in exposing Russia’s state-run doping program — which ultimately led, last week, to its track team’s historic banishment from the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this summer — she had no country to run for. She could only hope that track and field’s ruling body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, might let her compete under the Olympic flag, as 10 refugees from a handful of countries are being allowed to do. The decision was expected in a matter of weeks. So she waited in exile, working out on a high-school track in a midsize American city that she did not want to be named. “I don’t even tell my mother exactly where I’m living,” she said. Vitaly was of the same mind. The couple worried that revealing their refuge might endanger them and their 2-year-old son and further threaten the peace, and perhaps the safety, of their families back home.

Husband and wife hit the line and launched into the final repeat. Vitaly doggedly set the pace until the last 200 meters, when Yuliya glided to the lead and ran hard through the finish. Afterward, gasping and bent over, grabbing his shorts, Vitaly turned to her hopefully. Maybe, instead of the 100-meter repeats, they could just do an easy recovery jog?

Yuliya was tempted. Her back ached from lifting weights, her son was sick with a racking cough, the sun beat down. For her post-workout recovery session there were no therapeutic massages or prepared meals in a team dining hall to look forward to. But she said at last: “No, we do the 100-meter strides.”

Everything was so much easier when she was a doper. “I remember the first season I ran using steroids and EPO,” she said, referring to erythropoietin, the hormone that boosts red-blood-cell production. The year was 2007. In eight months, when she was 21, her personal record for 800 meters dropped to 2:04 from 2:13.

Now, at 29, with a two-year doping suspension behind her, Yuliya was chasing those previous times — and her long-shot Olympic ambitions — without the benefit of banned substances in a place nestled among mountains still dusted by snow. “My coaches before don’t have patience for altitude training,” she said. “Russian coaches don’t believe in athletes. They believe in drugs.”

Yuliya stretching before a workout earlier this month.Credit
Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times

The Russian doping scandal was catalyzed by a German TV documentary in 2014 based on video and audio recordings secretly made by Yuliya Stepanova, which captured leading Russian sports officials, coaches and athletes discussing the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs. Those revelations led to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s investigation and its report last November that accused Russia of running a vast state-sponsored doping system fueled by bribery and intimidation. Its report — in which Yuliya, in her role as principal informant, is named more than 100 times — prepared the way for further revelations by Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Russia’s anti-doping lab, who told The New York Times this year that he personally served steroid-and-whiskey cocktails to Russian athletes and doctored dirty urine samples during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

But the exposure of Russia’s cheating can be traced back even further, to Vitaly and Yuliya’s first date, in the summer of 2009.

He was 27, an educator and doping-control officer with the new Russian Anti-Doping Agency, or Rusada, the country’s first organization of its kind, created to support Vladimir Putin’s determination to host the Sochi Games. Vitaly Stepanov was working at the agency’s information booth at the Russian national championships in Cheboksary, handing out leaflets and swag bags and chatting with the athletes. Yuliya Rusanova was 23, running the 800 at the meet. Between heats, she and a few other women wandered over to the booth. After a few minutes of conversation, Yuliya gave Vitaly her email address. A week or so later, they agreed to meet for a date in Domodedovo, a town outside Moscow where her aunt lived.

They intended to go to a cafe or the cinema, but they started talking and never made it out of his car. “I assume Vitaly knows everything about doping because Rusada are the ones who help cover it up,” Yuliya told me later. “Everyone in Russia knows what’s going on.”

Yuliya told Vitaly about the coaches, the training camps, the injections and pills. She described some of the byzantine nature of the Russian doping world. Yuliya said that her goal was to become a member of the Russian national team and that she would continue to participate in a system fueled by performance-enhancing drugs.

Vitaly was stunned; he suspected that many Russian athletes were doping and that Rusada might be turning a blind eye, but he had no sense of the scope of the cheating, even though he had been working for the agency for more than a year. He told her about his efforts to do a good, responsible job with Rusada, to fight for clean sports, to make testing apply to all athletes equally, to follow the World Anti-Doping Agency’s rules.

Yuliya told him her coaches said all countries were doping, everyone was doing it, which is why they did too — it was the only way to compete internationally. And Rusada helped them. Vitaly said he didn’t think that the anti-doping agencies in other countries were helping to cover up doping. Yuliya shook her head at this man’s naïveté. “At the end of the evening we both say, This will never work out,” Yuliya remembers. As Vitaly recalls it: “We are two idiots sitting together in this car.”

Photo

Vitaly and Yuliya warming up at a local track.Credit
Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times

He went home that night but couldn’t stop thinking about Yuliya. “The next morning I go to my office and request a conference with my boss,” Vitaly says, adding that he regarded the man as a mentor. “I told him everything that Yuliya had told me — all about the doping and cover-ups. Could this be true? I asked.” Vitaly remembers that his boss was quiet for a long time, 30 seconds or more. When he finally spoke, he changed the subject entirely. Later his boss told him, “Take my advice and don’t get involved with this girl.”

“I knew then that everything Yuliya had told me was true,” Vitaly says.

Yuliya Rusanova’s childhood was as cold and hard as the name of the city where she grew up, Kursk. “My father was an alcoholic,” she says. “When he drank, he beat my mother, he beat my two sisters and he beat me. When he didn’t drink, he was a good man. He worked in a factory. We had a garden. We had animals — pigs and chickens. Two weeks would go by, and my father would not drink. Then he drinks, and he beats us. I was always afraid. I just wanted to grow up fast and get away.”

When she was 14, the 2000 Sydney Olympics lit up her TV screen and, she says, “I dreamed what it would be like to be one of them.” Yuliya liked sports but had no encouragement or model for pursuing them. She enrolled in a vocational school to become a heating technician. When the school held a field day, Yuliya entered a 500-meter race and finished third. Only the winner got a medal. “I wanted to win a medal,” Yuliya says. “So I start to train. I wanted that medal.”

Soon after, at 17, she began to work with a local coach who had once been an elite-level competitor in the steeplechase, an obstacle-course race typically run over 3,000 meters. Yuliya tried that and other long-distance events, but she preferred the middle distances, especially the 800 meters. Despite showing promise, she lacked confidence; she was starting late, and other girls were much faster.

“I trained for one year, and I start to hear things from other girls,” Yuliya says. “At the dining hall in the training camps, the girls were talking about the pills and the shots. This is what everyone does, the girls were saying. You can’t be on the national team without using these things. If you don’t take them, you have no future in sport.”

The coaches, she says, told her that for a female 800-meter runner to break two minutes, the threshold of a world-class time, she had to perform certain workouts — workouts possible only with pharmaceutical help. The fastest a clean athlete could expect to run, the coaches claimed, was about 2:05.

So, Yuliya says, she asked her coach, Vladimir Mokhnev, to be put on the program. “He tells me I haven’t been training enough yet,” she recalls. “‘You’re just getting started. Wait a while.’” In 2006, she came down with a serious lung infection. To help her “recover,” Yuliya says, Mokhnev persuaded a doctor to prescribe a steroid medication, a regimen of testosterone. Thus began Yuliya’s doping career. (Mokhnev has denied her account.) She maintained a detailed training log — all her training, all her races and all her drugs. “When I first started with the drugs, I was scared,” she says. “I thought it is bad, but after a time I understand it is normal. All the runners do it. And it works! It is hard to explain — you make the same effort as when clean, but you go faster.”

In a written statement she provided to the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2013, Yuliya notes that once she was receiving effective testosterone injections, her personal record for 800 meters dropped to 2:08:47 from 2:13. “Summer 2007 was the first time when my coach gave me Oral Turinabolan pills and EPO injections,” she writes; her personal record then dropped to 2.03.47. (Turinabol is an anabolic steroid that used to be given to East German athletes in the 1970s and ’80s.) “I was seventh in the nationals for my age group. Oral Turinabolan I took every day for 15 days from 12.05.2007 to 26.05.2007. At that time, it was known by athletics coaches that Oral Turinabolan is detectable for 40 days.” Yuliya’s statement then says that she received EPO injections subcutaneously every other day from May to October 2007. “I was told EPO is detectable for nine days after the last injection. As I was told by my coach, there is always doping control, and national championships and his whole preparation (training and prohibited substances) was calculated the way that I was clean while competing.” In the winter of 2008, Yuliya writes, she was doping as she had the year before. “I did testosterone injections the same way as the previous winter. Also I took nonprohibited substances. My PR [personal record] moved to 2:01:96. I won the national championship at my age group and became a member of a national team (20-23 age group).”

Photo

Yuliya, right, in the women’s 800-meter semifinals at the International Association of Athletics Federation World Championships in 2011.Credit
Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images

Over the next few seasons, she followed a progressive drug regimen. “The more I trained, the more pharmacological help my body needed to keep improving,” she writes in her statement. “Sometimes from taking prohibited substances, my muscles were getting very tightened, and I just couldn’t run. Sometimes my blood was getting very thick. I had to keep training through these problems, as I thought that all athletes are going through this.”

EPO was injected into a vein in the arm, while testosterone was injected into muscle in the abdomen or buttocks. At the peak of her drug use, Yuliya says, she was getting up to three shots a day. “But a lot of the coaches don’t know what they’re doing,” she says. Yuliya claims that Mokhnev, for instance, kept giving her shots in the same spot in her buttocks, which eventually led to a painful cyst. “After a time, I learn to give the injections myself,” she says.

It all seemed worth it. She was making a good living through various government agencies that paid her a salary, even though she had no duties beyond training and racing. She earned around $4,000 a month, a considerable amount in Russia. She spent much of each year in training camps in Russia and abroad. Yuliya had succeeded in growing up fast and getting away.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“Our first date — at end of which we both decide this will never work, we must not see each other again — was in August,” Vitaly remembers with a laugh. “We got married in October.”

On their honeymoon in Egypt, in the fall of 2009, Yuliya continued to tell Vitaly that her ambition was to make the Russian national team. And she was clear that at the upcoming training camp she would still be taking banned substances.

“Maybe you could get these results without doping?” Vitaly asked her. “Isn’t there something else?”

“What is this something else?” Yuliya shot back. “Do you know what it is? Are you a coach?”

By December, the couple agreed that their hasty marriage had been a mistake and decided to end it. “Russia has a good process for divorce,” Vitaly says. “If there are no children, it is very straightforward. You go to an office and file papers. Then you go away for one month to think it over. In one month, if one person or both returns to the office, that’s it, they stamp the papers, you’re divorced, no questions asked. But if after one month neither person comes back to the office, they tear up the papers, and you’re still married.”

When Yuliya returned to Moscow in late December from training camp, she and Vitaly proceeded to the office where they would formally dissolve their union. When they got there, however, it was closed for the holidays. “We took that as a sign,” Vitaly says. “We will stay together and try to work this thing out.”

Yuliya, however, would eventually come under the guidance of Dr. Sergey Portugalov, who was known among Russian athletes to be the leading expert in the use of banned performance enhancers. (According to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s report last November, the independent commission responsible for the investigation found that “not only did Dr. Portugalov supply performance-enhancing drugs to athletes and coaches but also administered the doping programs and even injected athletes himself.”) “I do the same type of drugs as before, EPO and testosterone and the rest,” she says. “But now I do them better, and the results are better.”

At the same time, Vitaly says, he had begun to actively resist his agency’s corruption, secretly corresponding with World Anti-Doping Agency officials about his frustrations and suspicions and speaking out at Rusada meetings. “Now when I went to track meets with Yuliya, the coaches wouldn’t even look at me,” he recalls. Vitaly was fired from Rusada in early 2011, when he says he received notice that the agency was “restructuring.” Yuliya began to notice a difference in the way her coaches treated her, which Vitaly attributes to “my unwillingness to take bribes and cooperate with them when I worked in Rusada — even though I was already fired, a lot of people in the athletics federation knew me and really disliked me.” This led to increasingly explosive arguments at home. “Not a week went by when we didn’t talk about divorce,” Vitaly says. “There is no logical way to explain Yuliya and me being together during this time.”

Photo

Vitaly and Yuliya after the first race they ran together, a six-kilometer run in Kursk, Russia, in September 2009. Yuliya is holding her second-place trophy.Credit
From Vitaly Stepanov

During the Olympic season of 2012, Yuliya suffered a thigh injury that derailed her shot at running in the London Games. She decided to change coaches and make a fresh start, her goal now the 2016 Games in Rio. With their marriage faltering, Vitaly assumed that Yuliya wanted a fresh start in that regard as well. “A new coach, a new Olympic cycle — I think that I am next. Get rid of the stupid husband!” On Dec. 30, the heart of the holiday season, they returned to the government office and filed for divorce. They completed the paperwork and were instructed to return by Feb. 8. Yuliya went off to a training camp; Vitaly stayed in Moscow. “Now it really seemed over,” he says. “I packed up her things from our apartment and took them back to Kursk. I was exhausted. It seemed pointless to continue.”

In early February 2013, Yuliya learned that she would barred from competition for two years by the I.A.A.F. — her blood tests indicated use of a prohibited substance, in violation of the World Anti-Doping Agency code. “In other words, I am to be the scapegoat,” Yuliya says. “Since I am a girl, I do everything my coaches say. I train like they say, I take drugs like they say. Now they tell me to keep doing everything they say. Take my punishment, my two-year ban, and don’t say anything. Rest, get healthy, and I will still get paid my regular salary. After two years, it’s 2015, and I can start training again for the Rio Games.”

Yuliya’s shock quickly gave way to anger. “When I just found out about being sanctioned, the world that I imagined to myself collapsed in front of my eyes,” she wrote in her statement to the World Anti-Doping Agency. “It was very bitter to understand that I’m being sanctioned and the people that set up such doping in Russia will not be punished at all and will continue to prepare athletes the same way.”

She realized that she had been exploited — and had opened herself to exploitation — ever since she was a girl at her first training camp. “Now I think three things,” she recalls. “No. 1, the officials are just lying to me again. No. 2, I get caught for doping a second time, I could get a lifetime ban. And No. 3, I have this crazy husband who has been fighting doping for years.”

Yuliya left training camp and returned to Moscow, where a meeting was scheduled with a sports federation official. He would review the details of Yuliya’s sanction and perhaps provide assurance that she could resume her performance-enhancing drug regimen as soon as her suspension was over. There was another event on her Moscow agenda, too: a return to the government office to make her divorce final.

Vitaly met her at the station, expecting they would go straight to sign the divorce papers. But instead, in a replay of their first date in 2009, they sat in the car and talked about the shocking news — about the ban, her mistakes and the betrayal by the coaches. She admitted that he had been right all along about doping and told Vitaly about the scheduled meeting with the sports official.

They discussed her options. One of them was for Yuliya to go to the meeting and secretly record the incriminating conversation on her smartphone. Vitaly could then deliver the recording to his contacts at the World Anti-Doping Agency, supplying solid, verifiable evidence of wrongdoing. In short, Yuliya and Vitaly could take on very powerful forces in a virtuous fight, but one that they had little hope of winning. Or they could drive to the government office and sign the divorce papers.

Yuliya took Vitaly’s hand. They drove to the office of the sports official, where Yuliya Stepanova began her career as a whistle-blower.

Photo

Yuliya with the couple’s son, Robert.Credit
Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times

After the workout at the high-school track, I returned with Yuliya and Vitaly to their cramped but tidy $500-a-month, one-bedroom apartment in a blue-collar neighborhood close to a running trail. About a week before the German documentary aired in December 2014, anticipating its explosive impact, the couple and their infant son left Russia for Germany. They lived in Berlin for a year. At the beginning of 2015, Vitaly was offered a job in the United States, and the family moved. The job offer fell through, but the Stepanovs decided to stay in America. Seeking cheap rent and a place where Yuliya could train at altitude, they eventually landed in this sunny spot in the mountains. Now, as Vitaly awaited a work permit, the family was getting by on savings and some money a supporter sends them.

After a quick shower, Yulia started chopping potatoes and a pork loin for a sour-cream gravy stew. She explained that she was taking classes to improve her English skills and seemed relieved whenever her husband took over the burden of answering my questions. “Our stormy time together has passed,” Vitaly said. “Doping almost robbed us of our marriage, but over the last few years, fighting against doping has given it back.”

The loneliness of that fight seems to have created an extraordinarily close bond between the two of them. “Even now, no one really wants to hear from us,” Vitaly said. He gave a resigned smile. “I guess we threaten a lot of brands.” No brand has been more threatened by the Stepanovs than that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has invested deeply in sports. “Don’t underestimate the smears and abuses they have endured and the danger they live under,” says the German journalist Hajo Seppelt, who produced the documentary that turned the spotlight on the Stepanovs and who has been threatened and assailed in response to his own investigative reporting. “Together, Yuliya and Vitaly have been Public Enemy No. 1 in Russia.”

In Kursk, Yuliya’s mother has been harassed at the hospital where she is a nurse — How could you raise such a Judas? When Vitaly’s father turns on the TV in Chelyabinsk, a thousand miles east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains, he has seen his son and daughter-in-law vilified as traitors.

As the Stepanovs’ actions and their impacts become better known, however, the rest of the world may regard them in a far kinder light. Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic gold medalist in the marathon and the first chairman of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, acknowledges the Stepanovs’ “giant contribution” and says “they have given hope to honest athletes all around the world.”

“To stand up for what’s right and to expose a state-supported doping system in their own country — against all odds — it’s incredible,” Travis Tygart, the head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, told me in an email. “Those who value clean sport are forever indebted. In their own way, they are both true Olympic heroes.”

Last Friday, the I.A.A.F. appeared to agree, ruling that “Yuliya Stepanova’s case should be considered favorably” by the I.O.C. for her “extraordinary contribution to the fight against doping.” Earlier this week, however, the I.O.C. seemed to kick the decision back to the I.A.A.F., leaving Yuliya’s hopes in limbo. Still, she and Vitaly claim to be at peace whether or not she gets to run at the Rio Games. “I don’t regret what I have done,” Yuliya told me. “And I am not angry at the Russian coaches and officials. I am only angry at myself, that I wanted to be part of that system, that I let myself get used for so long.”

John Brant is the author, most recently, of “The Boy Who Runs: The Odyssey of Julius Achon.” His work has appeared numerous times in the Best American Sports Writing series.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.